My journey through Reading Natures and our Living Book has taken me down pathways that I had never considered or even fathomed before. During the earliest weeks of term I was convinced that Watery Worlds would be the only topic I would find interesting or engaging (because whales are my favourite animals). But arriving in our final week of the term I have just finished four weeks worth of research and reflection in the realm of the Insect World. 

Whilst researching the Anthropocene I was drawn to the idea of ‘dwelling’. Heidegger explains that to dwell “is to create and caringly maintain a place of habitation within... ‘the fourfold’” (Rigby, 2004, p.430). ‘The fourfold’ exists in the interweaving of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, and to dwell in the fourfold is to “create and preserve things and places” (Rigby, 2004, p.430). My ecoconcept, sevarbugfolgenate, is my interpretation of dwelling in Heidegger’s ‘fourfold’; watching (while standing on the earth-plane) an insect (following its trail across the sky) so intently that one (a mortal) enters a trance-like state, metaphysically leaving the human world (a notion of divinity) to enter for a short moment into the world of the insect.

It has been said that anthropocentrism (the idea that humans are at the centre of the Universe) is “an unavoidable feature of the human condition” (Rigby, 2004, p.428). The more I travelled through Reading Natures and our Living Book the further I strayed from anthropocentrism, and the more I questioned how this could ever possibly be the belief of anyone who’s ever had any interaction with and in nature.

The way bees can sense the electrically charged field around a flower, the way moths cannot physically pull away from the path of a beam of light, the way there exists objects so huge that humans cannot comprehend their endings or beginnings… all of this is proof to me that anthropocentrism must give way to ecocentrism. Rigby believes that the “magnificent symphony” of the “song of the earth” (2004, p.434) will survive human efforts to name and tame it, but for how long? I pondered the destruction wreaked upon earth in the wake of the Anthropocene and reflected on Dubino’s idea that as a human living in “the era of the world’s sixth largest species extinction, it is hard to talk about non-domesticated creatures, insects included, in spite of their vast numbers, without thinking of loss and impending death” (Dubino, 2013, p.9). That is when I realised that the life of my favourite animal, the largest animal known to have existed(!): the blue whale is just as important and in fact inextricably linked to the 14 day life span of the tiny honey bee.

And thus I have ended up here at the end of a term in Reading Natures having developed a new sense of interest in and indeed affection for the tiny insects that share the earth with me. I will continue to servarbugfolgenate with deep pleasure, but a pleasure tinged with a lingering sadness left by the knowledge of the destruction of nature at the hands of the Anthropocene.

- Steph Philipov, z3417828

 

References

Dubino, J. (2013). Virginia Woolf's Dance-Drama: Staging the Life and Death of the Moth. Virginia Woolf Miscellany, (84), 9.

Rigby, K. (2004). Earth, world, text: On the (im) possibility of ecopoiesis. New Literary History, 35(3), 427-442.